


Build the Castle Tall and Strong

by EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: And No One Shall Convince Me Otherwise, Day At The Beach, Family Fluff, Fluff, Hannibal Lecter Loves Children, Kissing, Little Girl-freeform, M/M, Mentions Abigail, POV Outsider, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, References Canon Death, Shells, Slightly Older Hannibal and Will, fluffy af
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-03 21:50:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14578395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12/pseuds/EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12
Summary: She watches them everyday: The curly-haired one that stands with the ocean up to his knees and the tall one that walks all along the beach, bringing back all of the perfect shells for him to look at.She watches them as the curly-haired man turns them over in his fingers, slipping some into his pockets, letting others fall back into the surf as she wonders how he decides their fate.





	Build the Castle Tall and Strong

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, folks! I'm at the beach for the first time since I was fourteen (God I feel old just thinking about how long its been) and was inspired by all the fun things going on. I hope you all enjoy this bit of fluff, its not something I usually write for these two, so its been a fun time! 
> 
> If you like this story, you can check out some of my other (more angsty) related one-shots in my "Lived, Loved, Lost" collection. And feel free to reach out on Tumblr, I'm currently looking for artists to do a commission for this story and another short one, and I'd love to pay someone soon. 
> 
> As always, I hope you enjoy! Please R and R, let me know what you think!

There were two of them. She watches them from the bars that guard her grandfather’s condominium from the reef, keeping her legs stiff and swinging in slow semi-circles with her arms stretched above her head. They were a strange pair, and the tall one always made her giggle with his swimming trunks that were even shorter than Grandpa’s and in all sorts of garish and unreal colors. The other one seemed more normal, his trunks coming past his knees and decorated in the same blue and brown plaids that her grandpa wore, but he still wasn’t totally normal since he also always wore a white shirt that covered half of his body, the top part unbuttoned and blowing in the big ocean breezes that came off of the water as he stood with his hands in his pockets.

She likes to watch them mostly through the misshapen tops of her sandcastles that she builds while Grandma pretends to be reading murder mysteries while she’s actually asleep in her beach chair. She stacks the little castles on top of each other, using her faded green pail to hold the water that works like glue to keep the tiny grains together, but still the squared off tops never hold and end result usually looks more like the Georgia Dome than a grand palace for the GI Joe, Power Ranger, and Bratz Doll she always carried down as the intended occupants.

The tall one spent what she thought must be lifetimes walking along the beach, digging his long feet into the soft gray sands at the edge of the dunes and picking up shells. She watched him, big hands full of soft shells, or small pockets laden with the fragile turns of nautilus shells, the sharp cuts of razor clams, or the perfectly rounded fan shells that made her think of the gas stations that Grandma and Grandpa owned a few of in town, as he came back into view after walking so far that he disappeared from sight. She secretly wished she could see the shells that he collected (he always seemed to find the best ones) and was always disappointed when he would walk out into the surf, digging his toes into the sands being pulled back out as he showed them to the one with curly hair. His curly hair was strange, the curls big and loose on his head, unlike her and Grandpa’s that curled tightly against each other and hung in ringlets along her face, getting heavy with the sand that caught in them while his seemed to stay free and loose, enough that Grandma sometimes mentioned how he ought to model shampoo.

He would turn to the tall man, the wind blowing his curly hair every which way, sun catching on the ends that were starting to turn iron-gray as opposed to his companions nearly white-silver hair, and reach out a hand. And each shell that he had collected would be placed on an open palm, their whispered words lost to the roar of the beach: the sound of waves and of the loud little boy that stayed there sometimes playing frisbee with his annoying dog, the sound of Grandma’s soft snores and the plane advertising “All You Can Eat Chicken Wings” that flew overhead every half-hour. But the curly-haired man would smile every time he found one that he liked, and his smile would make the tall man smile, too, even though the other man wasn’t usually looking at him. She wondered how many jars of shells they had at home, probably as many as Grandma at this rate, who kept them in everything from the clear glass lamps to the cabinet with all the plates.

She had started watching very carefully to figure out how he decided which shells he liked. Most of them ended up tossed back into the ocean like the stray starfish that the tall man sometimes tossed back into the surf so that they could escape the seagulls that were scrounging for crumbs, and she was yet to figure out how those that ended up in his plaid pockets got that way.

She watched carefully, keeping her hair out of her eyes, at the first thing he did. She would take up her own discovered shells, of lower quality, she was certain, than the tall man’s, and would mimic his motions. First, he turned them over in his palms, so she did the same, looking at all the worn cracks and crevices in the shell, turning them over and over until he stopped out there in the water. Sometimes that was the end, and the shell would vanish out into the greenish-hued waves that pulled the beach back out to sea on every pass. Sometimes, dissatisfied with her own find, she would give her own a toss into a nearby tide pool, certainly disturbing the tiny sands crabs that were beginning to nest there.

If they made it through that first analysis, it was then that things got a little muddy. It was hard to tell what the curly-hared man was doing, mostly because it was usually then that the tall man would lean in close to him and start talking until they both laughed and smiled and sometimes kissed right there in the surf even though Grandma would only kiss Grandpa in public if no one was looking. But what she thought was happening is he was running his hands over the grooves and edges, feeling the dips and cracks and deciding whether or not there were too many to make it worthwhile. Sometimes they were tossed back out to the water, sometimes dropped if they were too busy kissing, but sometimes they were slipped into a plaid pants pocket to go home. And then they would leave, the tall man entwining their fingers and pulling the curly-haired man along the surf, sometimes getting splashed all the way up to his thick gray chest hair that was the same color, but thicker than Grandpa’s if the curly-haired man was feeling especially playful.

This left her at an odd conundrum. It was not as though she could follow them and ask how exactly to find the perfect seashell to top off her castle, which of the rounded, razor-thin, or cracking shells might be best to mark her barricades and give Glitz and Glamour Bratz the best kingdom to laud over. But they always walked away after the tall man brought his shells back for the day, and to the point, she had never quite found the one to satisfy her. She could have sworn that the tall man watched her sometimes, maybe even smiled once over at her, but she always ducked her head and kept stacking her sand. She didn’t want them to know that she watched them, and she was worried that Grandma might not be happy about it either, so she didn’t look back at him.

There was little difference in the mood today. The beach was overcast and uncrowded, Grandma didn’t even have on her sunhat, but she did have her sunglasses on to hide the fact that she was napping. It didn’t cover the snores, though, just her eyes, and as she built her sandcastles next to Grandma’s chair, they were so loud she nearly jumped once and lost a bucket of carefully mushed sand that was supposed to be most of the western blockade.

The curly-haired man was out in the surf, this time standing far enough out that she knew he must be standing down in the bed of sand-dollars that were out on the shelf right past where the waves broke. As she glanced up through the deepening hole she was digging, she could see him pick one up sometimes, hold it and turn it over like he did the shells before he let it drop back into the water.

But she was too distracted to pay much attention. Armed with a new castle mold, she was finally getting the squared tops that she wanted for her castles, with the right shell it might actually be perfect. She looked at the little pile of shells she and Grandma had collected before Grandma said her feet were too tired to keep walking, and frowned. None of them would be the perfect shell, and this would be another summer afternoon wasted on a pointless venture and a crumbling kingdom with no flag.

“Hello, there.” The voice that startled her from her focus was unfamiliar, and she looked up to see the tall man standing there, looking down at her as the breeze made his white hair blow slightly around the tips. “May I sit with you?”

She nodded, gesturing to a spot clear of bunched up sand. He sat carefully, digging his toes into the sand while he emptied one of his hands of a stack of shells. She pretended not to look at them, but she could see how pretty they looked, probably collected from the shell beds down the beach where the surf shack sold them at high prices to people too lazy to go look for them.

She curled her lips, tilting her head to look at the shells. “This is a very impressive castle.” He said finally, after she didn’t speak, “Are these supposed to be the occupants?”

“Yeah.” She said, with a sigh, knowing her voice sounded like it was dragging. “I try and build one for them almost every afternoon.”

“It seems you have succeeded today.” She looked up at him, his eyes a strange color of brown, much lighter than her own. His voice was strange, almost like Grandpa’s friend Henri who said the word croissant when he came over to try and make her laugh (she was not sure what Henri thought croissants were such a funny food), but it was just a little bit different.

“Almost.” She agreed, and scooped some water from her pail to drizzle over the top, making the tips stick together much better. She frowned when she saw that one of his shells was light purple, the same color as Glamour Bratz’s dress, and would make the perfect topper to the castle.

“What do you feel your construction is lacking?” He moved his hands to where they were wrapped around his knees, his long fingers laced together. One his hand was a thick gold ring which was probably the reason that the curly-haired man was coming up behind them now, seeming to move quickly out of the water.

“Alfonso,” The curly-haired man came up before she could respond, “what are you doing?”

“Aiding in the construction of this fine castle,” The tall man, Alfonso apparently, smiled up at him, and the man with curly hair pushed his glasses back on his face with a noise that sounded a lot like the one Grandma made when Grandpa left socks on the living room floor. She thought that might be overstating his role since all he had actually done was sit and pester her with questions while he tempted her with shells.

“It needs a shell.” She said, and both of them looked at her. “How do you pick out the best shells?” She asked the curly-haired man who stared down at her, eyes wide as she squint-stared back at him. “I see you look at them all the time,” She added, “I can’t figure it out.”

“Perhaps a demonstration is in order, David?” Alfonso said, and she had to admit that perhaps he was being incredibly helpful as the curly-haired man sat down with a grumpy huff, looking over the pile of shells that Alfonso had deposited.

“You are absurd,” He said under his breath. She wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but Alfonso smiled so it must have been a compliment of some sort. He picked up the top shell, a perfectly formed razor clam, and turned it over in his palms before going to toss it into the tide pool where her own rejects always went.

“But how do you decide if you have to throw it away?” She asked, setting down her shovel next to the pail.

“Yes, David, how is it you decide which shells to keep?”

“If I kept all of them we wouldn’t have any space left in our house.” David grumbled and she couldn’t help but giggle at the image of the two of them sleeping on beds made of all the perfect shells that Alfonso had uncovered in the shell beds, unable to move since there were so many pushing at the windows and door frames.

“Then you must have a particular process,” Alfonso insisted, and winked over at her. She nodded vigorously, happy to finally learn. David, meanwhile, pushed his glasses back on his nose, lifting his eyebrows so much that the tiny wrinkles by his eyes disappeared for a moment.

“Since you insist,” He finally said with a hard glare at Alfonso, “The first thing I do is look for cracks and holes. If it has too many, I throw it away.” She nodded heavily, watching his fingers. “And then I touch all over the shell. If the texture is right, then I keep it. If not, I throw it back.”

“Insightful.” Alfonso said and smiled over at him. She pursed her lips and looked at the stack of shells between them, very much wanting to test out the purple one. “If you would like, I think that you could perhaps test David’s method to find yourself a shell.”

He reached down, and with long fingers, plucked the purple one from the small stack and handed it to her, careful not to disrupt the carefully placed sand structures. She turned it over in her hands, looking for cracks of which there were virtually none. Then she felt it all over, feeling only smooth, even grooves under her fingers.

“It’s perfect,” She said, and looked up at Alfonso and David. “Can I really have it?”

“Of course.” Alfonso said, and David just blinked (she was starting to think he didn’t really want to be over here at all) and she lifted it into the perfect position at the crest of her castle, pushing it down into the sand before adding a little bit around it to hold it in place. When it was finished, she stood, ignoring the sand all over her legs to look at it from all angles, squealing in delight.

By the time she had sat back down, David had stood back up and was walking back to the ocean, his back to them. “Does he want the shell back?” She asked, almost whispering. She didn’t want to give it back, but if it weren’t for David and his very picky method of shell collection, she wouldn’t have it to start with.

“No, I think he is quite happy to let you keep it.” Alfonso assured her. “You remind him of our daughter.”

“Does she like the beach?”

“I’m sure that she did.” He answered, his voice sounding very far away. She nodded, not really knowing who wouldn’t like the beach, and started to build on extra parts to the castle and dig out the beginnings of a moat. She wasn’t sure how long he stayed there, long enough for Grandma to wake up and look over at them suspiciously until he introduced himself and David, who was looking back out at the waves and the dolphins that were emerging and submerging only a few meters past the shelf as they caught fish.

But eventually, as Grandma made he stand and extract her castle inhabitants so they could go back to the condo, he left and went out to David, another shell in his hand. But as she watched, David kissed him so hard that it slipped from his fingers into the water before either of them could check it for cracks, breaks, or the perfect texture.


End file.
